Home Defense Zones Jeff Anderson

Transcription

1 Home Defense Zones Jeff Anderson Welcome back, everyone. This is Jeff Anderson, editor for Modern Combat and Survival Magazine and Executive Director of the New World Patriot Alliance, with another podcast to help you better prepare for any threat you may face in your role as a protector and a patriot. This month we re going to be talking about home invasion defense. Let s first talk about the reality of home invasion, and whether or not it s even something you would even expect to have to deal with in your home. According to the FBI and Department of Justice, 3.7 million homes are broken into each year. That covers burglaries and home invasions. But of that 3.7 million, one million of them happen with the residents at home. Of these, 27 percent of the time the residents that were home became victims of the home invaders. In other words, there was some sort of injury or trauma that happened to the residents of the home during the home invasion. If my math is correct, which sometimes it isn t, but my calculator helped me figure this out, that s 270,000 victims each year from home invasions. Let s compare that to another number here. Because there are 374,000 house fires each year, and of those 374,000 house fires there are 15,575 injuries and deaths from those fires. These are figures, I think they were from So 15,575 injuries and deaths, versus 270,000 victims each year from home invasions. What that means is that you re nearly three times more likely to experience a home invasion, and 17 times more likely than a fire to become a victim of that crime. What that means is that people in general are far more prepared for a house fire than they are for a violent home invasion, even though you re far more likely to experience a home invasion and become a victim in your home than you are to see your house actually catch on fire. But when you think about it, how often do people really prepare for home invasion, versus how many people have fire extinguishers and fire alarms and smoke detectors, and all those things in their home? We recognize that we always have a threat of a fire, but we re actually three times more likely to experience a home invasion. Yet people really don t prepare the right way for it. No. Buying a gun does not mean that you re prepared for a home invasion. As you know, the gear is not as valuable as the tactics that go into using that gear. It doesn t matter what it is. Right? Well, we re going to fix that this week and next week, because you have to be able to understand how to prepare things. I want to give you some real practical tools that allow you to do that.

2 This week we re going to go ahead, and we re going to be showing you how to prevent a home invasion. Then, later on we re going to be talking about defending yourself and your family against once you re targeted. So this week we re going to be taking a peak at your personal residence, even if you live in an apartment or something like that. I m going to show you, with some very simple techniques here, that you can harden your castle. You can really make it an impenetrable fortress. But we re going to give you the tactics, just in case something happens there. So let s go ahead and get to the tactics now. What we re going to do is we re going to break your residence up into five different zones, and I m going to give you strategies for each one of those zones. I m going to try and go through these kind of quickly. We don t have to worry about taking notes. There s going to be show notes for this. You re going to be able to get the download of the audio. You can listen to it over and over again. When I was in executive protection, normally when we were doing a security assessment we always started from the epicenter. We always created a central point that was our fallback point, and we branched out from there in zones beyond that one epicenter right there. But from a soldier s standpoint we kind of did things the opposite. If we were in an area, the first thing we did was we established a perimeter. Then while that s protected, that s when we fortify personal positions, and put up obstacles and things like that. But the very first thing is to go ahead and put out a perimeter. This follows along with another common term that we use which is detect, delay and defend. So if you can detect a threat, the sooner you can detect a threat, the better off you re going to be. The faster you can defend against something. Rather than it being a shock to you, and now you have to scramble to try and identify the threat and react to it. So we re going to follow that path right here with these five zones, and we re going to start with the perimeter. Let s look at the outside perimeter of your home right now. This is important because your goal is NOT to have to engage an attacker in your home, or even go outside. Call 911. Let the police come. Let them do their job. You do not want to get into a gunfight out on your front lawn, or even inside of your home. Your whole goal is just to survive and protect your family. If you can do that without ever pulling the trigger, all the better. This isn t your opportunity to try out those great tactics you ve been doing at the range, or try out some new trick you ve learned in a book or something like that. Your goal is just to call the police. Let them do their job. But let s say that while they re coming we definitely want to be able to detect a threat and delay a threat. So the outside perimeter, it all starts with knowledge. I m talking about the far perimeter. Meaning your neighborhood, your city, your surroundings. Do you know the types of crimes that are happening in your area? Do you know how the criminals are performing those crimes out there? Do you have any connections with the police force? Have you ever brought them into your neighborhood association or to your apartment building, or whatever, and had just

3 Trust me, those police officers, their community outreach officer is looking for opportunities to come out there and meet the public. The police these days really are trying to integrate more with their neighborhoods. This is an opportunity for you to find out from them, what kinds of things are happening. Are there break-ins in our area? A lot of people think that they live in a safe area, when you might find out that just a couple blocks over maybe there have been a string of break-ins, and you re only a couple blocks away. So make friends with the local police. Have them come out, or just connect with them and ask them the questions yourself. That s one thing. Knowledge really is power. But let s talk about the actual perimeter of your home right now. So again, the further out that you can push that detection screen, basically, the better off you are. One of the ways to do that is with a perimeter alarm. I live out in the middle of the country. I don t have a lot of houses around me that can spot somebody trying to get into my home or something like that. I m relatively secluded from the rest of the people around me. So that means that I don t have the benefit of being in a busier area that criminals might look at and say, well, there s too much chance of being noticed here and so we re going to move on to someplace else. So a perimeter alarm, especially since I have land and things like that, it can give you a 360-degree, essentially a perimeter line, that will go off and will notify you if there is actually somebody that comes onto your property. You ve got to be kind of careful in how you set this up. I have lots of deer around me and things like that. So it gets to be kind of a pain in the ass with some of the different alarms out there. The one that I like the most is Guardline. You can get this on Amazon. It s one that you can actually set up a perimeter with. I really like that one. But putting out a perimeter alarm is a very helpful thing to do. This might just be at the end of your driveway, just so you know when somebody is coming into your driveway. It gives you a notice and lets you know that somebody s on the property. Another thing you want to look at are motion lights. Motion lights are good because they basically put any sort of a criminal, or anybody creeping onto your property, they give them that deer in the headlights stare. They don t know sometimes whether it s somebody flicking on a switch so they ve just been noticed, or whether it s truly a motion alarm and they should just keep going on. But either way, even if it s a motion alarm, they realize that the light is on. You could look out the window at any one point and see that the light is on, and then be warned about them coming, and that takes away their element of surprise. So even that can still warn people off, or get them off your property, because they realize that you re more aware than somebody else might be. So motion lights. The other thing is to put up an alarm sign. I believe in alarms. Alarms are very, very important. I think everybody should have them. But when you put an alarm sign out, you don t want to put out the alarm sign from the company that installed your alarm. All you

4 want is just a sign that says This property protected by an alarm. You can get those, again, on Amazon. They don t have a company name on it. The reason for that is because if you do have a really smart burglar or a home invader, or something like that, and they know what kind of system it is, there might be ways that they ve determined that they can bypass that system, to be able to stop the alarm from happening, if they know what the company is. So just get a general alarm company sign, rather than your actual alarm company. The other thing is, with that alarm, you want to make sure that it is monitored as well. It s not just a sound off alarm. If you can get monitoring I recommend that you do that, because you never know when you can t get to the alarm and you re going to want somebody to be able to monitor that. Especially if you live out in the country like I do, somebody might not even hear that alarm. The other thing you could do on the outside perimeter is put out a Beware of dog sign. I ve talked about this before. The one thing that burglars or home invaders hate even more than not even more than, but other than an armored homeowner, is a dog. Even if you don t have a dog, just get a Beware of dog sign. Put it up on your perimeter, somewhere maybe near where they come in the driveway. You can do it on your front step. But as far as I m concerned, if I can stop people further out on my property the better off I m going to be. So those are some tips just for the outside perimeter. Now what we re going to do is we re going to work our way in toward the exterior of your home. So the one thing you want to do is take a look at your house from the outside. Especially if you have neighbors, go to where they might be. Go to where your neighbor s house is. Stand out in the road and look at your house from the street, from your neighbor s side of the street, maybe even from your neighbor s property. Or if you re that close with your neighbors, go on the side of your house where they might have windows where they could look out and visually see your home. What do you see? Look at your home not as you the homeowner, or as you the gardener, but look at your home from the standpoint of a criminal. In other words, are there shrubs that are in front of the window but they are hiding, where somebody could get behind there and they could go ahead and break through glass, or whatever, and nobody would really see them. A lot of times plants start out small and all of a sudden they become overgrown, and then they re blocking the view so that somebody can actually get into your home. The same thing goes with your front door. A lot of people put up these shrubs where their porch is, especially if they have a porch where the door is perpendicular to the road, not flush staring straight at the road. Those shrubs get really high. Those trees get really high. Our trees grow up in front of it. All of a sudden you can t see your front door.

5 Your front door is the most important spot because that is where most home invaders actually come through. It s not through\ a broken window or anything like that. Typically they re coming straight through the front door. So make sure that you don t have landscaping that s blocking all of that. On the other side of it, you can use certain landscaping to be able to keep people away from those entrances. On the side of the windows you might look at different types of bushes that are spiky and spiny. Things like what s the thing for Christmas? I forgot what that s called. But anyway, there s some spiky plants out there. I live in Texas, so we have cactus. So there s cacti that you can put in front of windows and those areas that people are not going to want to go. Rose bushes, that s one of the ones I was trying to think of. So you can put some rose bushes. Those things are like concertina wire. You put those in there and people are going to get wrapped up in them, and they re a real pain. So rose bushes are a really good thing to put in front of windows that s pretty, it s beautiful, but it also can keep people out of areas like that as well. So going to your front door again, you want to make sure that your front door is solid. You don t want any hollow doors on your exterior, any doors that could easily be broken into or broken through. You want to make sure that they are solid wood doors, or metal doors, that are going to be harder to get through there. You want to make sure that there are no windowpanes near the handle, where somebody can just kind of break through the one little window pane, reach around, unlock the door and get through at that time. The other thing you want to do is you want to make sure that all your doors and windows are locked at all times. At all times. Even when you re home. I m guilty of this as well. Sometimes my son leaves the garage door open. But you want to make sure that you are locking everything, your windows and your doors, just to make sure because look, if somebody comes up to your front door and it s just open, all they have to do is just go in the front door. All of a sudden you have somebody in your living room, and you re trying to figure out why. So make sure that you lock everything at all times. If you do have a sliding glass door, you want to make sure that you get either a wooden dowel or a piece of PVC pipe, that when it s closed you can drop that down into the bottom of the door, in the door track, so that even when it s unlocked it can t get pushed open. So somebody might be able to unlock the latch, or something like that. But if you have that bar in there, that dowel or the PVC pipe, that will keep it from sliding open as well. The other thing that you can do with a sliding glass door is to cover it with eight millimeter security film. This is a clear film that goes on any glass. You can see right through it. A lot of places might have it. If you re in a hurricane area, a lot of building zoning laws might require you to have it in certain cases because it will stop the glass from shattering. That s what you want it to do for security purposes. So you re going to need about eight millimeter security film. Again, you can get this right on Amazon. Really

6 easy to find. You can cover your sliding glass door, and you can do your windows with it as well. We did talk about alarm system before. You definitely want to make sure that you have an alarm system, but you want to make sure that it has a panic button on it. So that if you have it off, if you re in the perimeter, or if you were taken hostage in a home invasion, you can quickly get away. Hit the panic button, rather than trying to call 911 or anything like that. Especially if your phone lines have been taken out or your phone s been taken away from you, or something like that, you can hit that panic button, and be able to just go with it and just be able to contact the alarm company. The easiest way to enter your home is actually you letting them in. This is really easy for people to do. In fact, we even have a little quiz on the front of our homedefensetactics.com website. For home invasion defense, there s a little quiz there about what do you think would be the easiest way for somebody to get in. Usually it means somebody talking their way into your home, or at least talking their way for you to open up the door. So having a way that you don t even have to open up the door, even without a secondary security chain or anything like that. What I really like is the new Ring doorbell. This is a camera, basically. So it s a doorbell. It alerts you when somebody is at your front door and you can visually see them, even when you re not home. One of the things I know. If I travel my spouse is here. If somebody were to come to the door and I m not there, well, they re dealing with a woman. If somebody were to say, Is your husband home, can I speak to your husband, I don t want her to say, No. He s not here. So with the Ring doorbell, I could actually have that ring doorbell this is a shameless plug for the company. I don t have any affiliation with them at all. I just think it s a really cool tool now. It alerts you on your phone, in whatever state you re in or whatever. You can talk to the person like you re at home. That s really good if you re trying to protect somebody while you re traveling as well. So those are just some tips for the exterior of your home. All right. Now let s talk about number three, which isn t really a zone in your house. It s more like a strategy. That s your escape route. What you want to do is you want to go around your house, because you never know when you re going to be attacked or where you re going to be when somebody invades your home. So you want to make sure that you have at least thought out what your escape route is for each area of your home. Your homework here is to kind of go into each area of your house, your living room, your dining room, your kitchen, all these different places, your bedrooms, upstairs, wherever it is. How would you get out if you were attacked and you were caught in that location?

7 This happens even for the apartment dwellers as well. There s a popular video that s out there about somebody that lives in an apartment, and their neighbor came through the door with a machete. So again, you don t want an exterior door of your apartment, or your house, to be a hollow door that somebody can get through with a machete, obviously. But you want to go ahead and look at how would I get out if I were here. A lot of apartment buildings, you might be on a top floor, there might be an escape route, or an emergency escape or something like that. But most of the time when I look at apartment buildings and things like that, there is no escape from there. You re counting on, if it s a fire, the fire department s going to come and put up a ladder and save you. Things like that. Well, you can t count on the police coming or the fire department coming, or anybody. You have to have an escape route for every place that you have in your home. That being said, when you re in there don t just say, Well, I would go through the window and I would crawl outside this way, or, I would go out the window. Even though I m on the second floor, I would jump out on a tree or something. You actually have to it would be great if you could test it all. But one simple test you can do is, do your windows even work? Do your windows even work? Anybody that s lived in an older house, like I have, knows exactly what I mean. They get painted shut. They haven t been open in forever. They get lodged there. They come off the track. You just ignore it. Like, I never open up this window anyway. If you re trapped in your home, or you re trapped in that room, and you need to escape, whether it s a fire or a home invasion or whatever it is, and you can t get it open, you don t want to be trying to bust through that thing. One, if it is a situation where you have a home invader on the other side of the door, you don t really want them to hear you breaking through a window, because they could come outside and try and get you as you re getting out the window. So you want to be able to open that window. If you have children, if you have small children, or your spouse, who if your spouse is not as big as you or not as strong as you, can they open up the window? This happens a lot of times. You might have a child in their bedroom. I use the fire analogy. That s a really good analogy. If there were a fire there, and they were trapped in their room, would they be able to open the window by themselves, to be able to get out of the room and save their life? On the other side of that window, is there a storm window there? Which those things are always hard to open up. So is there another window there that they would have to get through, the screen or the storm window or something like that. Those things are really hard to break through because they re really hard, solid plastic. They re meant for storms. So would they be able to break through that? Probably not. So can they all be opened up? Another thing is if you are on a higher elevation, you have a second floor, or you re in an apartment building or something like that, do you have a ladder that will allow you to get

8 outside of your home or apartment building if you didn t have anything else outside? If you re on the second floor, do you have a rope ladder, or any sort of emergency ladder, that will allow you to get out and climb your way down? In our house, we re on the side of a hilltop, we re about, in some cases, four stories tall, because there s a sheer drop off on the other side of it. When that happens, the person that s trapped up in an upstairs bedroom is going to have to go out one of those windows if they are trapped. They do make extended ladders that are very, very long. So just make sure that you have a ladder that somebody can get out, if you are in a higher elevation like that. Zone number four. Let s go ahead and get into the standoff area of your home, the interior of your home. So the one thing I always tell everybody is you really have to know your home. You have to really look at it with different eyes now. Where are your cover locations? In other words, where are the places that you can get behind that will stop a bullet? That s cover. That s not just concealment. That s cover. That s actually going to stop a bullet, if there s bullet s being traded between you and the bad guy. Trust me. The couch is not cover. That s concealment. Concealment can still work in your advantage. If somebody breaks through, they don t know you re there, or it might be dark in there, you can get behind the couch. They don t know you re there. You can surprise them as they come through. That s not going to give you cover if they saw you and they shoot through a couch, but it could give you enough concealment to be able to surprise them. But cover s always going to be best. Can you place items strategically there for cover? In other words, can you put a bookcase this is a tip I got from my friend Massad Ayoob about putting a bookcase there filled with books, because those books will stop bullets. You can strategically put those on the corner of a hallway, in the living room in the corner of the hallway, that allows you to get behind the corner in your hallway, and have all that protection there from a large bookshelf, where you can shoot from behind it. But even if they try and shoot through the wall, it will hit the books and that gives you really good cover there. So that s just one example of how you can strategically place cover, to be able to give you lots of fighting positions if you are in your home and you are able to fight back. Given that, let s talk about fighting back. I carry concealed every single day. I m carrying right now. I carry from the time I get out of bed in the morning until I go to bed at night. Even if you are not a concealed carry license holder, you can still carry in your home. So even if you re not in a state that recognizes it, or a city, or whatever it is, or you just don t have your license, don t want to get your license, or whatever it is, having a gun in a safe up in your bedroom closet is not going to really help you a whole hell of a lot when somebody s charging through your front door. You want to be able to make sure that you can get to your handgun as quickly as possible, and the best place for that to be is right there on your person. Again, even if you don t have a concealed carry license, you can carry inside your home. So do it.

9 The other thing that I recommend people doing is to have backup weapons staged. There are different things that you can put around the house, that either you or someone else can use as a weapon of opportunity. Some examples of that might be a machete hint, hint, our Guardian machete. A collapsible baton is really helpful. A youth baseball bat is really helpful because it s smaller. A youth baseball bat is better because it is smaller, and you re talking about areas in your home. You re talking about close quarters combat, essentially. Having that youth baseball bat means that people, your children or your spouse or you, can use it. It s not as heavy, but it will do a lot of damage as well. So just get one of those. I also recommend having pepper spray around as well. Just having it in a drawer somewhere allows you to get to it really quickly in case you are able to use whatever works, works. The other little trick I ll give you for the interior, and this is really for more of a nighttime home invasion sort of a thing, is to put blue glow plasma nightlights throughout the house. These are little flat, LED are they LED? I don t know if they re LED. They re plasma, basically. They have a soft glow to them, where they re not super bright. But they do create this soft presence of light in your home that doesn t give you can put those all around your home. They don t cost a lot to have them. They don t take up any electricity, so it s not going to cost a lot to run them. But at nighttime they ll just be there glowing. It helps to light the way for you. If you get up in the middle of the night, or your kids get up in the middle of the night, or whoever gets up to go pee or grab a glass of milk or whatever, you re not tripping over the LEGOs that are all over the floor or something like that. But the other thing that it does is it allows you to see out there what is in your living room, if you will. If you hear a noise at night, it s not like you re just going to call 911. Usually your spouse is going to say, Hey, I thought I heard a noise, and you can go ahead and call out. But you might just want to look out your door first. You want to look out your door, and look out there and see if there s something out there. If there s a blue glow out there, it keeps you from having to use a flashlight to be able to go out and see if someone s there. Or they might see the flashlight shining out there. So it keeps your night vision as well, but it also keeps your element of surprise if you need to be able to fight back. All right. Let s go ahead and go to the fifth zone, which really does get down to your epicenter, which is your safe room. I m not talking about you needing a steel panic room like they have in the movies there. But it is your strategic location for your line of defense. In other words, your best action, if somebody is trying to get into the home, if they re trying to bust through the front door, it s not necessarily to stay right there and wait for them to come through the front door. Because you don t know if somebody s coming in

10 the back door as well, or somebody s already in one of the downstairs bedrooms. You just know somebody is trying to get into your home. So what you want to do is get your entire family into your safe room, your designated safe room that you have identified in your house, that will allow you to make that final stand. In other words, if they get to that room it s because they don t care about your television. They care about harming you. That is the mindset of a home invader. They re not necessarily after your television. They want to terrorize your family, you and your family, potentially murder, injure you, rape, torture has been part of these things. Look, it s not pretty. I m sorry for the shock value in that. But it s a very intense, very violent threat that home invaders have on us. So you want to make sure that you have that last final stand to be able to if they get to that point, that s where your defense zone is. Hopefully you can escape out of there. But if you can t, this is where you put your last line of defense. I m going to give you a few tips here for your safe room, but I have a special gift for you as well. That is we have a program. I put this together with Massad Ayoob, who is a very well known firearms instructor and author out there, and things like that. We put together the ultimate safe room plan. You can get a free copy of that by going to You can have that entire report all for free. I m not going to go into all the different things there. But that will show you how to choose the right safe room, the best room in your house, ways that you can fortify it as well, as what items to put inside of it so that you have all of your defense gear already waiting for you. You don t have to try and get everything together. But you do want to make sure, again, that even though this is an interior room you don t want an interior door. You don t want a hollow wood door on the interior. The other thing is you want to take out those little short screws that they often give you for hinges, and you want to replace it with screws that are an inch-and-a-half, two inches, or better, driving that into the frame, so that that door can t just be kicked in off the hinges there. The other thing you want to do is when you re inside of the room, you want to make sure that the door opens away from your hiding location. In other words, when they open the door and it comes in, that they can t see you, even if it were cracked a little bit. In other words, you want to almost be behind the door, but not behind the door. Right? You want to be the last thing they see as they re opening the door. When it goes fully open, that s the area that you want to try and set up your defense so that you can see them coming in. You know they re coming in. They re in your sights. But they don t know where you are. They first have to find you before they actually have a chance to shoot you at all. Again, the other thing is you really do have to have a means to escape from there. You don t want to choose a room where there s no outside window to be able to get out of. Because one of the things for home invaders, if they feel like they are losing this battler, or they re not going to be able to get you out, or whatever it is, what s the worst weapon

11 that they can unleash on you? It s not necessarily shooting through the door or anything like that. Fire is the easiest weapon that they have. So if they set your home on fire and you have no escape from your safe room, that s not going to be a good situation for you. So you want to make sure that your safe room does have a way out. Again, the bonus report that we have is going to give you a lot more information about how to build out the ultimate safe room. It is free. All you need to do is to go to and go ahead and pick that up for free. Next week we re going to be talking about weapons, specifically home defense weapons, the best weapons for home defense. We re going to start off with the handgun. So you want to make sure that you stay tuned for that. But I also want to hear about your tips for these different zones that we talked about. What are some other preparation tips that you have for fortifying your home, inside and outside, and even for a safe room? Go ahead and leave those in the comments of the blog area where you are listening to this right now, hopefully. If you re on itunes, make sure you go over to moderncombatandsurvival.com, and check out the blog post that we have for this podcast and leave your comments there. Until next week s episode, this is Jeff Anderson saying prepare, train and survive.